An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since I have a weak spot for Clint Eastwood, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even though I did appreciate the anarchist vibe, it is hardly surprising that it had been a commercial and critical flop when it was released as the whole thing turned out to be an overlong mess. The first bewildering thing was obviously to have Eastwood playing in a musical and, even though it was nice that he tried something completely different, I’m afraid he wasn’t really convincing. As a matter of fact, he seemed completely lost. On the other hand, even though Lee Marvin had received apparently some really bad critics when this movie was released, I thought he was actually pretty good. Apparently, he pretty much recycled his oscar winning performance from ‘Cat Ballou’ but it has been years since I saw this movie so it didn’t bother me. To round up the cast, there was also the lovely Jean Seberg who was still quite gorgeous almost 10 years after shooting ‘À bout de souffle’.  While watching this movie, I was thinking that I have actually seen only a few movies starring this actress but I guess she became famous more for what happened in her private life then for her actual work. Still, even though the damned thing was rather misguided, there were a couple of interesting ideas. The main issue was that the whole thing went way over budget with some expensive sets, 100’s of horses, 1000’s of extras,… where they should have cut down maybe 1 hour of running time and hire some actors who could actually sing. At least, Lee Marvin tried very hard and often succeeded to make the whole thing still entertaining to watch (while being completely drunk most of the time) but it was probably the only thing that really worked in this flick. Anyway, to conclude, even though my rating was probably too generous here, I guess the damned thing is still somehow worth a look.